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Curated by Pooja Sood
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Ranging
from the overtly political to the deeply personal, Scherzade
at the White House by Ein
Lall and Man
with Cockerel by Ranbir Kaleka frame the selection of videos for
the How Can You Resist? - Freewaves media festival.
Kaleka's zen-like video Man with Cockerel mirrors and
maps each desperate nuance of dual desires: one to hold, the other
to escape while Rashid
Rana's Ten Differences questions this
notion of duality in a violent manner. The mirror image of Rana
aiming to shoot himself - embodies the violence of today.
The events post 9/11 have had a profound impact around the globe.
Reactions by artists in South Asia in particular, to the war waged
by President Bush in Iraq have been unanimously angry, critical
and rude. Several of the works in this selection are around the
thematic of war: this includes artists from Pakistan who as Muslims
have felt the heat and pain of a world wide prejudice that has
been unleashed upon them.
Part video game, part digital imaging interface, part remote weapon
control system, Reconstruction by Bani
Abidi is a double channel
work where the richness of an ancient Iraqi carpet is systematically
destroyed by an unseen hand. Black lines at right angles replace
the arabesques as plans for its reconstruction are
simultaneously laid down. On an adjoining screen a man raps his
belly to the tune of an American military march.
Set to a quirky subversive tune, Irresistible Attack, by Subodh
Gupta is an angry and rude comment on the arrogance of a nation
as it wages war on a helpless people. Inundated by footage of the
attack on Iraq by the USA in the western media, the artists' video
mocks the media generated images and questions the coercive potential
of information streams.
Using found footage of the Iraq war in her triptych Scherazade
at the White House, Ein Lall subverts these very media images.
In titling her work Scherazade at the White House, Ein
Lall alludes to the fictive 10th century story of a senseless revenge
killing
by King Shahriyar. Scherazade, helpless as she is, counters this
stupidity and aggression with intelligence and empathy. This hard
hitting video piece defines the archetypal King Shahriyar which
Lal unashamedly likens to Bush and Blair. The 3 channel video installation
centers around an incident that occur-red at the Najaj on the 31st
March 2003 when a car full of innocent women and children was shot
at by American soldiers at a check point, killing ten of them.
The arrogance of this new imperialism is echoed,
albeit subtly, in Conversations by Aisha
Khalid. This 2 channel
video installation shows a rose being lovingly embroidered by a
brown hand only to be ripped apart, thread-by-thread by a white
hand. The sharp nick of the needle as it tears the thread from
the cloth is the only sound that we hear.
A second section of videos consist of essentially performative
videos that focus on the body in a variety of ways. From violence
against self as expressed by Rana in Ten Differences to the celebration
of body in her own personal ritual, Monali
Meher in her video piece
Blue Nostalgia converts daily activities into ceremonial acts.
Meher uses her body to communicate the personal memories of longing
and belonging, also commenting on female stereotyping within Indian
society. Using the color blue, along with a meditative soundtrack
to indicate a state of mind, Monali uses this piece to bridge the
past with the present.
Subodh Gupta's powerful performative video Pure, questions the
tenuous relationship between belief and ritual. In India cow dung
has contradictory connotations; within spiritual belief it assumes
a position of the cleanser/atoner whilst its day-to-day associations
are with waste as the defiler. Gupta uses his body as the subject
and object of a scene in which contradictory notions of cow dung
are ritually played out in an urban context.
Both Gupta and Ghosh deal with the notion of urban waste in
the widest sense, but they view it in distinctly different ways.
Ghosh's video Remains of a Breath has a deeper ecological undertone.
Dealing with a being in stasis: locked into the eternal cycle of
burial and exhumation, his work looks at waste not only as characterizing
the city and its living but also reflecting on the contradiction
within it as someone's waste becomes another means of livelihood.
But it is Sheba
Chhacchi's Neelkanth or The Blue Throated
One, that posits the ecological with the mythical; venom and
waste with hope and beauty. The Indian myth of Neelkanth, The
Blue Throated
One who opened his mouth and swallowed the flaming black mass
of poison that was going to destroy the world is relocated in the
context of the contemporary Indian city/infoscape where each of
the five elements (earth, fire, water, air, and ether), the five
senses (smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing), and the power
of the word itself is poisoned. Her video of a blue throat ingesting
the waste of a city asks if the city can be a mandala for the generation
of knowledge from the mass of information that floods us? Can we,
like the archetypal Neelkanth, find means of containment and transformation?
Can we make nectar from poison?
– Pooja Sood |
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